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The II Annual Conference on the Art and Science of Services will be held on May 25 and May 26 at Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Spain. Last year the conference focused on issues relating to teaching services; this year it will address the research challenges facing both academics and practitioners.  Because your reputation and interest in services is well known, we would like to invite you to participate in this year’s meeting.

This sequence of conferences was inititated following a meeting in the fall of 2004 at IBM’s Research Center in San Jose that focused on the need for a new area of study they called "Service Science." After that meeting, we worked with IBM to organize the first conference on the Art and Science of Services at Bentley College last June. That meeting focused on the need for business schools to develop a new teaching paradigm that meets the needs of an information-driven service economy. The very positive feedback that we received on last year’s conference from all who attended suggested that we hold another, this time focusing on research issues in services.
 
Services, by their very nature, are transdisciplinary. Therefore, one of the goals of this conference is to provide a forum for individuals from operations, marketing, human resources, information technology, and engineering to exchange ideas. We also want to include both practitioners and academics to ensure that the most relevant issues confronting service managers today are identified.

Again this year, both IBM and McGraw-Hill/Irwin have agreed to sponsor this by-invitation only meeting. To cover remaining costs, there will be a small registration fee of about 150 euros.   We are still in the process of developing our invitation list and would be delighted to hear from you about others in your field who have an interest and are making a contribution in the field of services.

As stated previously, the conference will be held on May 25 and 26 (Thursday and Friday) at Instituto de Empresa, in Madrid , Spain .  We will be sending out information on the conference registration, hotels, etc., in the coming weeks. For those of you who would like to present papers, there will be additional sessions scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, May 24.
 
Please let us know if you are interested in attending the meeting and also if you would like to present a paper.
 
We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
 
Luis Solis, Co-Program Chair, Instituto de Empresa
 
Mark M. Davis, Co-Program Chair, Bentley College